The fastest way to get 1,000 subscribers on YouTube right now is to post YouTube Shorts, and I have proof. But warning, it’s not as simple as that. There’s a right way to do this and there is a wrong way to do it.
For example, on a brand new channel that I started recently with zero subscribers, I posted a YouTube Short and in the first 28 days, it got 7,405 views. Not too bad. So, I decided to try this out again, and in the first 28 days of my second YouTube Short, it got 32.1 thousand views. Again, not too shabby.
But I got an idea. I could do better than this. So on my third YouTube Short, I tried something completely different. As you can see, within the first hour of posting this Short, I got 76,000 views. To date, Short has brought in over two million views and 6,600 subscribers.
Now, if I just would’ve posted this kind of Short on my YouTube channel on day one, you can see I would’ve hit 1,000 subscribers in nineteen days. Now, on this channel, it actually took me 28 days to get my first 1,000 subscribers, but I believe I can help you get there even faster.
Why YouTube Shorts Are Effective
People know that YouTube Shorts are getting pushed by the algorithm right now, and so if you are posting YouTube Shorts, the chances are, you’re probably getting a lot more views on your Shorts than your regular videos, especially if you’re just a beginner. However, what a lot of people don’t know is that Shorts actually convert more subscribers than long-form content does. And here’s the proof.
On this channel, I posted a regular video, and you can see that it took off and got a million views in the first 62 days. And if we crossed over to the subscribers, we can see that, in the first 62 days, it got 1,241 subscribers from those one million views. Now, on the YouTube Short, we can see that, in the first 19 days, it got a million views. And when it comes to subscribers, on that day 19 when it hit a million views, I got 3,910 new subscribers. That means that my Shorts are getting three times as many subscribers as my regular videos. Fastest way to get 1,000 YouTube subscribers
Lessons from My Viral Shorts
Let me explain why the first two Shorts did not do as well as my third Short. You see, on the first two, I really didn’t give it much thought. I actually used the clip method that you can do on your phone. And so, I didn’t even have to edit these Shorts. I just pulled them from my long-form content, I clipped it into a Short, I tried to add some text, and picked the best moment from that video, and they did pretty well, but they ended up tapering off and not performing that well over time.
Now, on my third viral YouTube Short, I decided to do something completely different. I decided that I was gonna spend the extra time to make a YouTube Short from scratch and upload it to YouTube. Now I spent a lot more time on the script and the edits, so this is gonna take a lot more time than just clipping something on your long-form video. However, it ended up being totally worth it. So let me share exactly what I did and how you can do this too.
Steps to Creating a Successful YouTube Short
Step 1: Alignment
The first step is alignment. You really wanna make sure that the Short you’re going to make aligns with your channel’s viewers. The reason for this is, YouTube is going to recommend this Short to the people who are already watching some of the videos on your channel. So you want those people to be interested in because this is the first pool of people who YouTube sees if they like your video and if they should send it to more people. And since my channel is about basketball and the NBA, I made sure that my YouTube Short was going to be about the NBA.
Step 2: Research
The second step you need to do is your research. You wanna start looking around in your niche at different Shorts that are going viral, that are getting a lot of views, and you wanna start to study them. Once you find some of these popular Shorts, you want to write some stuff down, specifically writing down the themes of the edits or the pacing or the text, the music, how are they putting this all together, how long are these videos, and start to analyze the data for what’s working in the niche. I found that there was kind of a specific format that did well within the basketball niche, and so I decided I was gonna take that same format and apply it to the video I wanted to make.
Step 3: Idea Generation
Step three is to come up with ideas. Just like a regular long-form video, you really wanna be thinking about, what do the viewers wanna watch. And then from that, you can reverse engineer a video that would be interesting to a majority of the niche. Now, a major power tip here that is gonna help you get a ton of views is to use trend surfing. This is when you utilize, usually in your title and your video, the most influential keywords, names, and brands in your video.
Step 4: Scripting
Now, once you have your idea, step four is scripting. For the script, you want to be as concise as possible and leave no fluff in this script. Shorts are very quick and you wanna make sure that you are getting to the point and getting to the next point as soon as possible. Now, if you have a long script or maybe you want to take one of your long-form videos and condense that into a Short, what you can do is go to ChatGPT and take that long-form script and then ask it to summarize and shorten that script. Then you can use that for your Shorts.
Step 5: Shooting
Step five is then to shoot your Short. Honestly, for Shorts, the gear doesn’t matter, but I like to think that audio matters more than video quality when it comes to the Shorts feed. And if you can, ideally, you’d move around and get different shots in different places throughout the video to kinda mix it up.
Step 6: Editing
This leads me to step six, which is editing. Now, the goal here is you wanna aim for a high average view duration. Meaning, that when someone starts watching your video, let’s say it’s a 60-second Short, which is the maximum duration you could do, you want them to watch all of it. Or maybe it’s a shorter Short and it’s 10 seconds long. You want them to watch that over and over again and kinda spike that average view duration.
Now, I have a method that I use that is gonna help you guys as well, and this is called the loop method. Now, you’ve probably seen this before when you’re watching a video and the ending synchronizes with the beginning. Now, if you’re going to do this, you need to start thinking back during the scripting phase, because the beginning of that script is going to have a sentence where the video starts on the second half of that sentence, and the video ends with the first half of that sentence. And that’s how it’s able to kind of mesh together perfectly.
Now, as far as the length that I was shooting for, I was going for a longer Short. Anywhere from 40 to 60 seconds is what I was aiming for with really the goal of keeping them entertained for as long as possible. Now, when editing, if you feel like you’re kinda stretching stuff out to make it longer just for the sake of making it longer, don’t do this. It’s better to keep it shorter. At the end of my video, it ended up being 45 seconds long with the average view duration being 41 seconds. And in the analytics right here, you can see that at the zero-second mark, it’s 186 people still watching. That means that there are people who watched the very end of it and then they watched the beginning again. And so that’s why it’s actually above 100%.
The Ultimate Hack: Combining Shorts with Long-Form Content
Now that you have your Short edited and you posted it on YouTube, here’s the ultimate hack that a lot of people don’t think of. And that is to post long-form content. Let me explain. The YouTube algorithm right now is trying to push Shorts, and it’s trying to find the right Shorts for the right audience. If you watch a new creator, let’s say, and you watch one video and maybe two videos, even if you don’t subscribe, what you’ll notice is you’ll start to see that creator’s Shorts on your Shorts feed.
So what I’ve learned is that when people find your long-form videos, your Shorts are gonna get boosted to those people who like your long-form content. Now to do this step, you need traffic coming into your long-form content so that it can also spike your Shorts views as well. And there’s a formula to do this that we call the perfect video recipe. This is the same formula that I use to get hundreds of thousands of views on a brand-new channel and even a million views on one video.
I’m Coach Emmanuel, a professional blogger and social media Manager with a wealth of knowledge in the online digital business realm.